1st MIRNete conference “The anxieties of migration and integration in turbulent times”

Being a part of the Western Balkans’ migration route, Serbia witnessed a transit of almost a million of irregular migrants through its territory during the migration „crisis” from June 2015 to March 2016. In the period that followed, the number of migrants has been steadily decreasing but the length of their stay started to prolong. Yet, integration measures have been largely missing, due to the Government’s expectations that Serbia is not the destination country for the migrants. The COVID-19 crisis which has been affecting Serbia as of the beginning of March 2020 witnessed the inability of migrants to transit and their encampment. Within the broader package of rather strict prohibitions for Serbia’s citizens in general which lasted until the beginning of May, irregular migrants witnessed even stricter ones – complete prohibition of mobility, in terms of their encampment.

The paper is focused on the Government’s measures directed towards irregular migrants from the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and consequent regulation of their life in the camps, surrounded occasionally by the army with the plans to be walled with a wire. The practice witnessed the withdrawal of civil sector organizations which were previously substantially contributing to the welfare of migrants in the camps. Along with the encampment, the irregular migrants thus confronted the lack of numerous services and factual inability to meet their versatile needs.

By looking into intersections of health, migration and security concerns, the paper argues that the Government’s measures contributed to further marginalization of irregular migrants in Serbia and the deterioration of their life. The methodological approach deployed is the review of regulations and interviews with policy stakeholders.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Migration decision-making

Governments around the world reacted to Covid-19 with a plethora of policies for internal and international movement. While travel restrictions and quarantine decreased mobility, evacuation and relocation increased mobility. How has the governance of human mobility during the pandemic, from March to July 2020, affected the concepts of borders and citizenship? Conceptual malleability closely relates to the individual-state relation, defined by legal status: being a resident citizen, nonresident citizen, dual citizen, short- or long-term noncitizen resident, or irregular migrant plays a major role in determining access to rights and mobility.

To analyze (non)citizen mobility within and across borders, we survey select countries’ government policies for Covid-19 and draw from an NCCR On the Move database that tracks travel restrictions. We find external borders pushing further into other territories and fluctuating internal borders. Short-term multilevel governance may instigate long-term repercussions for mobility, borders, and citizenship. A stronger Leviathan style approach may expand for citizens and noncitizens through states extending biometric controls before, at, and after crossing national borders. For previously mobile individuals in the globalized world, the pandemic may permanently change rights to mobility and residence by unevenly maintaining barriers for travel, study, and work abroad.

Keywords: Migrant perspective, borders, citizenship, pandemics

The article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the situation of labor migrants from Central Asian countries in Russia. On the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2020, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Russia, about 1.2 million citizens of Central Asia were registered at the place of stay for the purpose of “work”. The ethnic specialization of labor migrants from Central Asian countries in the Russian economy is highlighted: immigrants from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan work in construction and agriculture, from Kyrgyzstan – in trade and services, public catering. The economic downturn during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly but unevenly reduced the employment of labor migrants from Central Asian countries in the Russian economy. It was revealed that people from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan who worked in construction, maintenance and transport lost their jobs to a greater extent. Based on a sociological on-line survey of more than 700 labor migrants (April 2020), it was revealed that the key problems of labor migrants from Central Asia during the pandemic were the loss of jobs and income, the inability to pay for housing and food, as well as increased pressure from the security forces. Taking into account the significant scale of the decline in production and the growth of unemployment among labor migrants in Russia, a forecast was made for a decrease in the volume of remittances to Central Asian countries in the coming months. The highest rates of decline in remittances are expected in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, to a lesser extent Kyrgyzstan. It is noted that a key area at the international level should be the coordination of Russia’s actions with the sending countries of Central Asia in the field of humanitarian aid, transportation of migrants to their homeland, and reducing force pressure on migration communities.

Keywords: Migration Process

Generating incomes from circular migration is a way of living for many Albanians who do not want to permanently leave the country. They move in search for jobs from spring to autumn mainly in the agriculture sector and the tourism industry. The liberalization of visas since 2010 has positively affected the circulation back and forth for three months’ time cohorts. According to the data of 2018, most of the first residence permits for Albanian citizens were released in Greece (for 16 936 Albanians), in Italy (23147) and in Croatia (1088). Yet these data just give a glimpse of the real situation where unregistered seasonal migrants are part of the picture as well. Approximately 20 000 to 25 000 seasonal migrants work in Greece during the summer, while 2000 to 2500 already have a Greek citizenship, live in Albania and work every once in a while in Greece so they lead a transnational life. Seasonal migration is considered as a win-win phenomenon, since the destination country gets labor force only when it needs it, the origin country takes advantage from the incomes and in the same time decreases unemployment rates, whereas the migrant keeps ties with home. This annual situation and chain of income generation was interrupted this year due to the restrictions from the Covid-19 outbreak. Through this article we want to explore the way the pandemic is affecting households as well as how the two countries are trying to reduce its negative effects. Although there are already some present measures taken form the two governments, the negative repercussions will directly affect household incomes which will probably lead to a more diverse population movement toward Greece.   

Keywords: Migrant perspective, Sending society perspective, Migration process

This paper draws on memory work and autoethnography to trace the figure of “rasiste Malvīne”, which I use to analyse how affective circulations outline differentiated whiteness. I met Malvīne in 2004 at an intensive Danish language course in Copenhagen. She was 19, a year older than me. We were both from Latvia, we had Danish partners, and we were both determined to learn Danish to enter the university. These likenesses seemed to align us. However, I felt we were very different. Malvīne talked at length about her anti-immigrant anxieties, about how “immigrants” avoided taxes and cheated “us”, the Danish welfare society. Buying nuts at the kiosk by the school, she would demonstratively ask the brown cashier for the receipt, while I hovered in the background, wishing that the earth would swallow me. I was embarrassed and confused: how could Malvīne claim to be a part of a (Danish) “us” if we were both Eastern European migrants in Denmark? I thought I knew better than “rasiste Malvīne”. In addition, I was anxious that her views would “stick” to me as a fellow migrant from Latvia.

In this paper, I discuss how my own anxieties to not be (perceived) like Malvīne, along with my anti-racist aspirations also constituted a claim to Danishness, Europeanness and (enlightened, tolerant) whiteness. I analyse how affective circulations contribute to different-but-complicit migrant becomings and whitenesses. The paper contributes to research on affectivity, whiteness and racialization in Nordic and European settings, in the context of East to West migration in Europe. Tracing how affective circulations constrain different claims to whiteness, I explore differentiated whiteness as an affordance and as a practice of mobility.

Keywords: Migrant perspective, Migration process, Integration, Affectivity

It is increasingly being recognised that the implications of climate change will include impacts on human mobilities, with people being forced to move away from climate impacts gaining the most visibility. While on the global level these issues are frequently connected on the political stage, this is not often done at the nation-state level in Europe, where these areas of politics and policy overwhelmingly remain siloed. This paper identifies viewpoints on climate change and human mobility held by political party politicians from Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Norway and distils idealised subjective positions. This is based on a Q-analysis with parliamentarians drawing on content from political party election manifestos from the most recent nation-state legislature elections in the five case study sites. One of the core controversies that this paper addresses is the tension between centre-left parties’ push for more action on climate change, at the same time as they pursue more stringent migration and border policies. In the context of policymaking on human mobility and climate change, this contributes to a humanitarian/securitised discourse of people moving in the context of climate change in which climate change is the means to the end of preventing refugee and migrant movements towards Europe.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Political parties

The concept of ‘the ghetto’ has been used excessively in the Danish public debate over the migration and integration of so-called non-Western immigrants over the last two decades. This study explores what can be learned from further historicizing this discussion and assesses whether the discussion is actually new, how it is new, and whether it has changed or not. Empirically, the paper builds on simple searches of the word ghetto’ in all Danish newspapers and policy papers from 1850 to 2018. This study underlines how the ghetto, throughout this long historical period, is looked upon as a social and spatial anomie. Furthermore, this paper underlines how perspectives on ‘the ghetto’ changed in the 1980s, when immigrants became synonymous with Muslims in Danish public debates. In this political debate, the concept of the ghetto is linked to those of ‘the mosque’ and “parallel societies.’ The results are a new way of disciplining and excluding ethnic and religious minorities.
Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Public opinion, Integration

For those who migrate, the future relationship with one’s home country can be varied. For some, the homeland is a dear akatund much-loved place, and a place one longs to return to on vacation, but not a return destination for living. For others, life in the host country has brought so many opportunities that looking back to the past makes no sense – from a practical point of view. One category of migrants, however, do “complete the migration project” and for various reasons, return home. As plans are made for return, the perception of what “home” will be like – looking from afar – may be shown up as a misperception. Blissful childhood memories, or recalling a time that has long-gone and is no more can end up showing that the returnee’s imagined homeland is at odds with reality. The sense of longing for family, nature, seasons, or just familiar territory may have escalated with time and visiting the homeland on vacation may have created the illusion that things have changed, or possibly stayed the same. This imagined homeland can be far removed from reality and actual return can end up triggering “reverse culture shock”. One source of anxiety can be the fear that return could be fraught with difficulties because of the perception that one’s children or life partner may find adapting to life in the homeland of their family member challenging. This anxiety, on behalf of one’s family members, can actually “make or break” a decision to return. This paper will unpack the perceived challenges of potential returnees, comparing them with the real-life situations that have already been encountered by other returnees. The research is based on findings from a qualitative study in the form of interviews with Latvian migrants in the UK and Germany and actual returnees to Latvia.

This study seeks to contribute to the research on intersectionality and asylum policy, by focusing on marginalized communities and their precarious lived experiences. My research explores how LGBTQ+ refugees’ approach and understand their intersectionality, and how UK asylum policies construct and define their social and cultural integration. My study aims to amplify the voices of the LGBTQ+ refugees’, a group that is considered “difficult to access”. This empirical research is the first of its kind in Wales, approaching forced migration arrival and settlement from a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer (LGBTQ+) refugees’ point of view. The LGBTQ+ refugees’ precarious lived experiences of arrival and settlement raise questions on concepts like otherness, belonging, sexual and gender identities. The participants’ narratives contribute to a broader discussion around sustainable and inclusive integration and we also gain vital understandings on how UK asylum policies perpetuate social barriers for “vulnerable” populations.
Keywords: forced migration, LGBTQ+, precarity, intersectionality, UK asylum policy

This paper interrogates and critiques the notion of pursuing higher education abroad as part of a simple staged transition from secondary education to the graduate-level labour market, either back home or internationally. It unpicks the complex relationships between international mobility, higher education, and the transition to work, and reveals a diverse array of trajectories which do not conform to the standard linear progression model. Empirical data are drawn from 40 in-depth interviews with young-adult (aged 18-35) students and graduates from three countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Latvia, Slovakia and Romania), who are currently studying and/or working in the London region. The interviews were collected as part of the H2020 ‘YMOBILITY’ project on new youth mobilities in Europe. We use these participant narratives to explore the diversity of how migration, study and work are intertwined with each other and enmeshed both within the broader life-stage transition from youth towards ‘full adulthood’ and within the evolving socio-economic transformation of post-socialist countries. What emerges is a variety of both standard and ‘de-standardized’ sequences, which include working abroad in order to study later, alternating episodes of study and work, and simultaneous work-and-study and study-and-work regimes. The particular combinations we analyse are partly related to the inequality in incomes, living standards and lifestyles between the countries of origin and London/UK, but also crucially dependent on the class and wealth backgrounds of the students, graduates, and their families of origin.

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the agency of Latvian migrants in the UK in the light of social changes triggered by Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the last four years Brexit has become a research field in its own rights. This, among other things, has produced thought-provoking studies about the migrants in contemporary Western societies in general and in British society in particular. The research on the Brexit-migration nexus have developed in different, but interrelated directions, such as analysis of ‘white’ working class, racial analysis of migrants, and studies on non-UK EU citizens (Antonucci and Varriale 2020). Migrants from Central and East Europe who represent a dominant segment of UK immigrants are of particular interest for these studies. This paper argues that scholars have too often framed CEE migrants as either submissive or victimized subjects in terms of Brexit. Specifically, this frame is explicitly or implicitly applied to low-skilled or medium low-skilled migrants. The present lockdown in the UK together with the lasting economic consequences of Covid-19 pandemic also provide a basis for thinking of CEE migrants as ‘more primed for the precariat’ (Standing 2011).

Drawing on the realists’ conception of agency (Archer 1995) and on literature of migrants’ agency (Paret & Gleeson 2016; Bakewell 2010), this paper insists that agency is a missing part in the analytical narrative about CEE migrants in the UK and their future prospects in uncertain times. To illustrate the argument, the paper focuses on Latvian labour migrants to whom the UK has become the main destination country. The paper is based on fieldwork that started in 2018 and will finish this year. The fieldwork consists of 25 face-to-face interviews with low-skilled or medium low-skilled Latvian migrants from England, three participant observations and online ethnography. The paper describes and explains how Latvian migrants perform agency thus mediating particular structural and cultural conditions in British society (e.g. language, working conditions, healthcare, class differences, place of residence etc.). The findings of this research suggest that the situational logic that underlies the agency displays strategic choices that both enable and block the acculturation of Latvian migrants.

Keywords: Migrant perspective, Integration

Losing Leverage’ in the Neighborhood. A Cognitive Frame Analysis of the EU’s Migration Policy.
The EU-Turkey Deal consolidated a shift in the EU’s migration policy. The deal is the culmination of the dominance of the security frame and depicts the continuous externalization of the EU’s responsibility of asylum-protection and burden-sharing. The strengthening of the security frame has weakened the humanitarian norms that previously dictated the EU’s behavior. The weakening of the humanitarian norms, combined with rigid security thinking in the humanitarian arena of refugee protection, has led to the EU losing some of its comparative advantages in negotiations. Simultaneously, the instrumentalisation of the value of asylum, paired with an increased number of asylum seekers, has given negotiation leverage to the neighboring countries turned service providers. These changes in perception and norms have created a power shift, at the disadvantage of the EU, creating a more levered footing for negotiations between the parties. This article tracks the historical shifts in the global refugee regime to explain how today situation is was created. Hereby, the existence of two competing cognitive frames – humanitarian and security – is assumed, tracked and analyzed. Afterwards, we zoom into the details of the EU-Turkey Deal and show that the EU has started treating refugees as a security problem rather than a humanitarian issue, breaking the normative fabric of the refugee regime in the process. We also display how Turkey was able to capitalize on this new reality and engage with negotiations of other neighboring countries of the EU that point towards a change of dynamics in the global refugee regime.

Keywords: Refugee Protection, Migration Policy, Humanitarianism, Securitization.

Italy was one of the European countries that were most prominently impacted by the so-called “refugee crisis”. Immigration was one of the main topics of the 2018 general election campaign: the right-wing Populist Party “Lega”, led by Matteo Salvini, owes a great part of its success to the promise to govern immigration (and integration) with an iron fist. The success of “Lega” is symptomatic of a significant shift in the Italian public opinion, which is steadily trending towards a widespread anti-immigration sentiment. Historically, Italian policymakers have adopted a passive approach to matters such as integration and multiculturalism, and therefore in Italy the burden of dealing with the more problematic aspects of integration with the new cultural minorities has fallen on the judiciary’s shoulder. Italian Courts have been consistently addressing matters such as polygamy, the face veil, honor killings, on a case by case basis, trying to perform a precarious balancing of equally constitutionally protected rights. The results of this jurisprudential effort were, mostly, reasonable and progressive, as the Italian judiciary traditionally acted as an “emergency brake”, a limit to populist and assimilationist approaches to the matters of integration. In this paper I will argue that in Italy even the judiciary was not immune from the aforementioned trend of the public opinion towards populism and the rejection of immigration and integration. Several recent judicial decisions show a drift from the (precarious) balance that was reached in the last decades and a further compression of the cultural rights of members of new minorities. The aim of the analysis will be to highlight the risks of an assimilationist drift in the jurisprudence of a legal system (such as the Italian one) in which the judiciary historically functioned as a safeguard for the implementation of the effective Constitution when it comes to regulating immigration.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Migration decision-making, Integration, constitutional law

The EU’s institutional and ideational anxiety in the context of the ‘European Refugee Crisis’

This paper draws on interviews with around 30 participants from the European Union (EU) Commission and various agencies including Frontex and the European Asylum Support Office. The perspectives of the policy-makers and practitioners responsible for the EU’s migration and asylum policies reveal how an institutional, ideational anxiety characterised the EU’s deliberations, decision-making and discourse in the context of the ‘European refugee crisis’. The interviews expose how measures to ‘take back control’ of the EU’s borders, driven by anxieties around public opinion, member state expectations, and the fragility of the Schengen and Dublin regimes, was accompanied by a discourse of rights and protection driven by an anxiety to preserve the EU’s identity as a ‘community of values’ and normative actor. But the inevitable tension between these objectives has led to a more insidious institutional and ideational angst, articulated by one participant who observed that the EU response to the refugee crisis exposed a ‘crisis of identity and vision of Europe’.

The paper traces the various anxieties expressed by EU officials in their reflections on the EU’s policy response to the refugee crisis, and illustrates how those anxieties informed the chaotic and coercive policies pursued. It concludes by suggesting that the EU’s response has consolidated an institutional and ideational anxiety that simultaneously informs its policies on migration and asylum, and undermines its self-constructed identity as a promoter and protector of rights and values.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Migration decision-making, ‘European refugee crisis’

This paper draws on interviews with around 30 participants from the European Union (EU) Commission and various agencies including Frontex and the European Asylum Support Office. The perspectives of the policy-makers and practitioners responsible for the EU’s migration and asylum policies reveal how an institutional, ideational anxiety characterized the EU’s deliberations, decision-making and discourse in the context of the ‘European refugee crisis’. The interviews expose how measures to ‘take back control’ of the EU’s borders, driven by anxieties around public opinion, member state expectations, and the fragility of the Schengen and Dublin regimes, was accompanied by a discourse of rights and protection driven by an anxiety to preserve the EU’s identity as a ‘community of values’ and normative actor. But the inevitable tension between these objectives has led to a more insidious institutional and ideational angst, articulated by one participant who observed that the EU response to the refugee crisis exposed a ‘crisis of identity and vision of Europe’.
The paper traces the various anxieties expressed by EU officials in their reflections on the EU’s policy response to the refugee crisis, and illustrates how those anxieties informed the chaotic and coercive policies pursued. It concludes by suggesting that the EU’s response has consolidated an institutional and ideational anxiety that simultaneously informs its policies on migration and asylum, and undermines its self-constructed identity as a promoter and protector of rights and values.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Integration, securitization

Venezuela’s economic, social and political crisis has led Latin America and the Caribbean to experience the biggest exodus in recent history. By the end of 2019, the UNHCR reported that 4.5 million Venezuelans migrants and refugees have fled their country. In this migration influx, Colombia has become in the principal shelter for Venezuelan migrants on account of its geographic, sociological and linguistic proximity. The Colombian 60% (~1 million) of them are in an irregular situation. This exodus has urged the Colombian government migration office reported 1.8 million Venezuelans living in the country by the end of 2019, where approximately to develop for its first time a policy framework for immigrants. Hence, this paper evaluates the integration policymaking process, its implementation, feasibility and challenges.

Specifically, it explores the role of various stakeholders that participate in the assistance of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia by interviewing NGO’s representatives, scholars and policymakers. This paper collects recommendations from various points of views that may contribute to the enhancement of the Colombian migration policy. Moreover, the outcomes of this research show how contested notions of citizenship (blurred membership and neoliberal citizenship) play an important role in the assistance of Venezuelan migration in the country. Furthermore, the findings suggest the recent COVID-19 outbreak is making the policymaking process move back to its initial phase as policymakers are more worried about protecting nationals than Venezuelans. By using categories emerged from the critique of the Global South analysis of migration, this paper identifies the complexities of integration in the Global South in turbulent times beyond western and north-centric categories.

Keywords: Public policy, Public opinion, Migration process, Integration

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the agency of Latvian migrants in the UK in the light of social changes triggered by Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the last four years Brexit has become a research field in its own rights. This, among other things, has produced thought-provoking studies about the migrants in contemporary Western societies in general and in British society in particular. The research on the Brexit-migration nexus have developed in different, but interrelated directions, such as analysis of ‘white’ working class, racial analysis of migrants, and studies on non-UK EU citizens (Antonucci and Varriale 2020). Migrants from Central and East Europe who represent a dominant segment of UK immigrants are of particular interest for these studies. This paper argues that scholars have too often framed CEE migrants as either submissive or victimized subjects in terms of Brexit. Specifically, this frame is explicitly or implicitly applied to low-skilled or medium low-skilled migrants. The present lockdown in the UK together with the lasting economic consequences of Covid-19 pandemic also provide a basis for thinking of CEE migrants as ‘more primed for the precariat’ (Standing 2011).

This paper examines the complex experiences of visiting friends and relatives (VFR) mobilities during the recent Covid-19 pandemic in the uneven British-Bangladeshi transnational social field. Mobility is considered as a necessary precondition for maintaining spatially stretched personal, familial and social ties. During the recent global pandemic such mobilities were severely disrupted. National lockdowns by many countries across the globe and the halting of international travel severely limited people’s capacity to physically travel. Visiting geographically distant relatives and friends, meeting them face-to-face and fulfilling cultural obligations and duties, such as providing care, was very challenging. Nonetheless, it was not possible to completely evade the compulsion to proximity and the need for co-present sociality for many migrants. The tough decision of travelling to the home country on the eve of or during the recent pandemic had to be taken. The mobility journey of those diasporic citizens was not necessarily undertaken in a stress-free way. Many migrants were physically stranded, emotionally overwhelmed and economically distressed. Drawing from recent transnational British-Bangladeshi experiences, this paper explores the economic, social and cultural consequences of disrupted VFR mobilities. By examining migrants’ visiting mobilities and immobilities in a global north-south context, this paper also challenges the dominant western-centric understanding of the mobilities phenomenon among free-moving migrants.

Keywords: Migrant perspective, Sending society perspective, Receiving society perspective, Migration decision-making, Migration process

We are a group of eight international academic researchers who study “global labour mobility” from different disciplinary perspectives and we would like to contribute to this conference with a collaborative, critical, auto-ethnographic piece. Our paper illustrates the importance of caring and community support as coping mechanism in the context of external threats and uncertainty caused by the COVID19 pandemic. With prior international mobility experience, we left our previous countries of residence in 2018, to join an EU funded project, investigating different aspects of labour migration, whilst being located in different European cities. One could hence classify us as highly qualified, privileged migrants. During the first five months of the 2020 pandemic lockdown in the EU, we conducted virtual dialogical self-interrogations and group reflections. Based on an emic, evocative research approach, we applied an iterative process of data collection and analysis in line with Chang, Ngunjiri and Hernandez’ approach to collaborative auto-ethnography (2013: 24). In addition to individual journals and social media posts, we recorded our weekly in-depth video-conversations, where we shared personal experiences, feelings and anxieties. Our weekly conversations naturally emerged as a safe space for exchange and understanding, as we were facing similar situations, despite staying at different places. Suddenly, as the privilege of “always being on the move”, “always socializing and networking” disappeared due to closed borders and pandemic threats, we experienced anxieties and isolation and had to re-evaluate our perceptions on life, work and international mobility. Beyond the “usual” fears triggered by the pandemic, we realized what it means to be not being allowed to move, being separated from significant others on other continents. Moreover, the very purpose and meaning of our research project and employment perspectives suddenly appeared to fade away with increased travel restrictions.

Keywords: Migrant perspective, Integration, collaborative autoethnography * privileged migration * coping mechanisms

Workforce integration of refugees is a complex phenomenon involving actors at different levels – the macro-institutional level, the meso-organizational level as well as the micro-individual level. These levels are interwoven and they affect how refugees are integrated at work. Previous research has pointed at numerous difficulties for refugees at each of these levels, related to formal status and residency permits, support for job search, discrimination, personal health and difficulties adjusting to the new environment, to name a few. Early investigations suggest that some of these challenges have been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The article seeks to understand how the pandemic has affected the workforce integration of refugees. Based on a relational framework, we focus on the meso-organizational and micro-individual level by looking at specific challenges for support organizations, and refugees in the workforce during the pandemic. We are thus capturing and making the voices of those affected heard. We utilize a mixed methods approach, including semi-structured interviews and a survey. Our data collection is focused on Austria, as one of the European countries hosting many people who either seek asylum or have been granted a refugee status, and with an elaborated network of support organizations responsible for workforce integration.
Anticipated results aim to highlight the impact of the pandemic on refugees in the workforce and support organizations across the three levels of the relational framework. In particular the results aim to show how support for entering the labour market has changed due to the pandemic (by analysing support organizations and their relationships with refugees). We also aim to show how the pandemic has job search as well as the work itself. Finally, we aim to provide avenues for further research into the topic of refugees in the workforce in Europe during the pandemic and beyond.

For the wellbeing and social coherence of the society, integration of the immigrants is very important. People, who are not related neither to other people (social relationships) nor to the state (diferent institutions), have a great danger to marginalize and radicalize (Lyons-Padilla et al. 2015). In previous research the integration of immigrants has been measured as a single measure (for example Yang 1994) and also as index (For example Constant, Roberts, and Zimmermann 2009; Danzer and Ulku 2011; Favell 2010; MIPEX 2015; Waldrauch and Hofinger 1997), combined of different measures. In current study Estonian Integration Monitor’s new immigrant’s data from 2017 is used and 3 sub-indexes (the indexes of the connections to non-immigrants, connections to institutions and connectedness to the immigration country) and one summary index are constructed to better capture the multidimensionality of the integration of the new immigrants.

In terms of methodology it can be concluded that the indexes of connections to Estonians, connections to institutions, connectedness to Estonia and the sum index measure different domains of integration, providing with tools that measure integration more widely. The constructed indexes are consistent in terms of the relations with socio-economic variables. These measures should be transferable to other contexts and It would be good to test these measures with the data of other countries.
The analysis shows about the integration of the new immigrants in Estonia that having a considerable ethnic group in the country lowers connections with main nationality. People coming from European Union and European Economic area are well integrated in other dimensions, but less connected to Estonia. On the other hand people coming from former Soviet Union are more connected to Estonia. Having the language of the country among main languages at work or free time increases the integration in all domains.

Keywords: Migration process, Integration

Contemporary events such as Brexit have drawn attention to the precarity of migrants’ settlement rights, thus reopening the debate on the nature of integration and assimilation processes. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Italian and Bulgarian migrants in Brexit Britain, this article develops a novel framework for understanding migrants’ anxieties and changing relationships with their country of settlement as well as their current and future practices. Such framework builds on sociological literature on ‘emotion work’ originally developed in the sphere of employment, and subsequently – intimacy and extends it to migration and diversity with an intersectional and transnational sensibility. Applying this framework, we explain the different kinds of ‘emotion work’ undertaken by our participants and their consequences. Through this framework we develop an original approach to examine the subjective experiences of integration at times of change, offering important insights into the emotional costs of the new-assimilationist climate that is sweeping across Western societies.

Keywords: Migration process, Integration, emotion work; settlement

systems and introducing new privileged migratory pathways for skilled migrants (Cerna, 2014; OECD, 2019). As global talent prefers to settle in cities and highly-skilled migration is a path-dependent and self-perpetuating process (see Czaika, 2018), the impact of these reforms is felt most strongly in urban settings. The arrival of transnational talent in cities tends to create peer-attracting professional and sociocultural environments and fuel the expansion of spaces of privilege that Saskia Sassen (1991) has described as urban glamour zones. In the context of highly-skilled migration, cities function thus both as the nodes of the global skill redistribution system, but also as places where identities and privileges linked to ‘transnational talent’ are being reproduced.

This paper argues that the privileged status of skilled migrants and their access to the spaces of privilege, however, is not a given, but is dependent on the continuous process of proving their economic worth and value deriving from their skills and transnational connections, which is often achieved by contrasting oneself to less skilled and less connected migrants and perpetuating their exclusion from the spaces of privilege and bounding them further to the spaces of deprivation and insecurity. The conditionalities of inclusion and exclusion and boundary-making within migrant communities are explored by looking at empirical research with two groups of skilled migrants in different parts of the world: engineers in San Francisco, USA and startup entrepreneurs in Tallinn, Estonia.

Keywords: Migrant perspective, Receiving society perspective, Integration, Highly-skilled migration

Based on what is currently been observed, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significantly different effect on majority and minority populations by race or ethnicity, with racial or ethnic minority groups being as significantly higher risk of suffering from COVID-19. But apart from immediate effects on health and mortality, the pandemic is followed by significant economic decline, with serious impact on labour market, small businesses etc. Current analysis looks at the first effects of COVID-19 emergency situation on the labour market in Estonia, with specific focus on comparison between ethnic minority and majority groups, as well as perceived impact on family income. Initial socio-economic standing, field of employment, age and regional differences as well as access to information are considered. The analysis is based on based on public opinion survey data collected on weekly basis during COVID-19 emergency situation, as well as other publicly available data. The implications from this analysis allow evaluating the differences in the impacts of COVID-related economic downturn on minority populations, and proposing possible policy measures aimed at mitigating the negative effect, that is likely to even more increase intergroup socio-economic inequalities.

In this paper we study citizenship education in Estonian secondary school with a key interest in policy implementation. The content of civics and its implementation is analyzed based on the normative perspectives on citizenship. We discuss the multi-layer implementation process focusing on teachers as street level bureaucrats exercising a wide discretion in decisions.

We are broadly based on the tradition of educational policy implementation studies and consider the cultural or argumentative turn in policy sciences where language is of central importance. Our key focus is on teachers and their understandings and teaching and learning contexts, but we discuss this related to civics as a national policy resource and as reflected by the students.

The questions for the empirical analysis are: (1) How are the main normative perspectives to citizenship constructed in the secondary school framework curriculum and civics subject outline? (2) How do civics teachers transform the regulations in curricula into the content of their subject? What is the role of the teacher agency in this process? (3) What is the teachers’ interpretation of students’ perception of civics topics? How is it reflected in students’ experience?

The article concludes with discussion of the results and policy suggestions.

Keywords: Integration, Citizenship

While there exists considerable research and theorizing on borders and borderlands, we believe increased attention to the conceptual tools of boundaries and boundary work will help elucidate the meaning-making processes related to migration. Individuals as well as social groups use available cultural repertoires of meanings to make sense of the world around them, and in particular to negotiate the distinction between “us” and “them,” drawing symbolic boundaries around different groups of people through boundary blurring, crossing, solidification or maintenance. In our research, we focus on the boundary solidification and maintenance occurring through securitization processes. Researching migration often means focusing on those on the move or on state decision-makers (securitizing actors). Our research shifts the focus to members of receiving societies (audiences), who also experience the phenomenon of migration, either through direct contact with migrants or through media technologies that nowadays play an important role in shaping public perceptions of migration. We situate our qualitative research in the Czech Republic, a populist country with rather low levels of migration but a high presence of the topic on the political agenda and extremely securitized public debates and anxieties, especially since the “refugee crisis” of 2015. To be specific, we conduct individual interviews in Brno, the country’s second largest city, investigating the ways in which people draw boundaries in relation to migrants through security speech acts. The aim of our paper is two-fold: first, to discuss the theoretical concept of boundaries and its linkage with securitization processes, and second, to present our preliminary findings. We demonstrate how securitization and its forms have become a mainstream frame for migration in the eyes of the audience and how securitization helps to maintain and solidify boundaries between “us” and “them.”

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public opinion

In Latin America, populism is not a novel phenomenon. There are three waves for its temporal classification: the classic period (1930-1940), neo-populism (1980-1990) and radical populism (from 2000 onwards). Each of them has unique characteristics in terms of discourse, host ideology and relation between the elite and citizenry. Yet, the exodus of Venezuelans throughout the region has apparently awaken a populist-nativist sentiment, both in candidates and leaders of political parties, as in the electorate, in which noncitizen residents (immigrants) are perceived as the “unpresentable other”. Employing an online dataset of 1,344 responses, promoted via Facebook, we examine the emotional underpinning of Ecuadorians vis- à-vis immigration, as well as their populist attitudes as latent variables. Thus, first in this article we explore the possibility to theoretically rethink the current populist wave in the region, and potentially construct a fourth wave of populism, a nativist-populism in Latin America. Second, it corroborates to what extend prior hypotheses of the European literature about the populist link between the negative emotions of the electorate and their intention to vote, particularly by far-right populist parties, travel to Latin America. We find that negative emotions fuel populist attitudes in the Ecuadorian electorate. We also report that negative emotions towards immigration become higher as the flow of immigrants increase in the country (of destination). Additionally, anger, fear and disappointment towards immigration partially conditions resident citizens’ intention to vote.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public opinion, Integration

This paper explores the ways in which mediatization of migration-related issues affects the decisions of domestic publics with regard to European integration. More precisely, we focus on when migration-related issues are linked with the EU in public perception, resulting in disintegration, differentiation or protection of the status-quo. Building on insights from the study of De Wilde and Lord (2016) on ‘trajectories of EU politicization’, we sought to determine the trajectory (domestic, international or remote) in which migration-related issues are politicized, and the implications thereof. We hypothesize that people will have a tendency to keep the EU at bay, when the migration-related issues are portrayed as an international conflict between their country and the EU.
We followed a case-study design adopting claims-making analysis to understand the trajectories of politicization of migration-related issues in the UK (disintegration), Denmark (differentiation) and Germany (status-quo). In order to investigate the trajectories, we examined two newspapers from different alignments per country. Our empirical analysis traces the migration discourse during the refugee crisis, namely between 2015 and 2018, which also comprises the Brexit referendum in the UK, the opt-in/opt-out referendum in Denmark and a general election in Germany.
Preliminary results show that rather than the level of politicization, it is the trajectory where the issue is politicized that matters. In other words, how an issue is mediatized is more indicative of outcome than how often it appeared in the print media.
This paper looks at the refugee crisis and its implications from the perspective of a combination of receiving states, societies, and the media.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public opinion, Migration decision-making, Migration process, politicization, European integration

The salience of security concerns and public anxieties has dramatically augmented across Europe and an increasing body of research converges on their acknowledgment as contributing factors to populist success (Grande and Kriesi 2012; Inglehart and Norris 2016; Kinnvall et al. 2018). This paper examines the way populist actors narrate insecurity to their publics, devoting particular analytical attention to the role of emotions as relevant factors for understanding populists’ appeal that need further investigation. The paper maps implicit emotional appeals through the methodological use of core relational themes (Lazarus 2001, 2006) and by empirically focusing on two ideologically divergent populists, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon during the last French presidential campaign. The contribution of this study is three-fold. First, it shows that not only right-wing but also left populists engage with processes of threat construction and do so with overlapping themes especially with reference to positing EU integration and ‘dangerous others’ as fundamental threats to European citizens and societies. Second, it shows that, other than exclusive discourses of fears, populist narratives of insecurity consistently appeal to anger while also coexisting with positive appeals to hope and pride; by doing so, it illustrates how these actors perform ‘emotional governance’ (Richards 2013), that is how they address, respond to and regulate citizens’ contemporary anxieties stemming from what is perceived as an increasingly integrated-uncontrolled world. Finally, the paper proposes a qualitative approach to infer emotional appeals from core relational themes that captures the latent emotional fabric of populist discourse and complements quantitative analyses based on emotion-laden words.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Integration, populist narratives of contemporary insecurity

During the ‘European migration crisis’ (2015-6), more than 38,000 asylum seekers found their way to Finland either by travelling through South and Central Europe or from Russia through the so-called Arctic route. Many of those were clearly fleeing war and persecution in their countries of origin, while some chose to relocate as a part of a flow of individuals on the move. This presentation focuses on these individuals who moved and relocated to Europe for the promise of a better future.

The presentation looks at migration strategies of two groups. The turbulent times of the ‘migration crisis’ generated a sense of urgency for migrants of different origin who had been living in Russia for years. They decided to seek for asylum in Finland due to insecure immigration status, poor working conditions and lack of access to decent housing and public services as well as of fear for forced return. Similarly, many Iraqi asylum seekers were disillusioned by their prospects in their home country and were thus eager to start life anew abroad. The hope of a brighter future convinced these individuals to try to onward migrate, even though their plans were largely based on false promises of the asylum route being a possibility to establish themselves in Europe.

The presentation is based on two sets of qualitative data: 1) 281 official asylum application protocols of migrants who used the Arctic route to seek for asylum in Finland and 2) 25 interviews with Iraqi asylum seekers in Finland. It concludes that major migration events, like this ‘migration crisis’, show how seemingly settled individuals are vulnerable to marketing by various migration merchants and are willing to move quickly when opportunities appear.

Keywords: Migrant perspective, Migration process

Over the past eight years, approximately 4 million Syrian refugees have settled down in Turkey, which emerged as the world’s largest refugee hosting country. Despite rising popular discontent, the ruling Justice and Development Party (hereafter, AKP) government refrained from adopting an anti-refugee agenda. What then accounts for the AKP government’s migration and refugee policies towards Syrian refugees at a time of heightened anxiety and opposition towards refugees in Europe?  Building on Gerasimos Tsourapas’s theory of refugee rentier states, this paper argues that the Turkish government since 2011 used Syrian refugees as a strategic tool and employed ‘refugee rentierism’, albeit in a political form. Yet, where Tsourapas’s theory only analyzes Turkey’s refugee rentier behavior from an economic perspective since the signing of the EU-Turkey Deal in 2016, this paper argues that Turkey’s Syrian refugee strategy is illustrative of political rentierism. In particular, the Erdogan administration used this issue to bargain with the EU and seek diplomatic consent for its increasingly authoritarian policies on the domestic front and gradually raised the stakes when this became a contested issue for a majority of Turkish voters.

As evidenced by the refugee dispute along the Turkish-Greek border in January/February 2020, the Turkish government does not hesitate to challenge the European Union by threatening to open its borders for Syrian migrants to cross into Europe but backed down eventually. The paper sheds light on the complexities of foreign policy strategies (using back-scratching or blackmail) employed by refugee hosting states to seek external rents and periodizes Turkey’s varying political strategies – their motivations and consequences – between 2011 and 2013, 2013 and 2018, and post-2018 through process-tracing.

Using empirical evidence from Turkey, the paper discusses how conflict in both the international arena and domestic politics compelled the AKP government to revise its political position and policies towards Syrian migrants over time and why this is of consequence for the European Union.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Public opinion, Migration decision-making, Foreign Policy

Massive labor migration in the Philippines has been persistent for more than 40 years. This has been mainly provoked by the country’s weak economy, continually suffering from insufficient regular jobs, work compensation packages and policies that ought to provide and protect the welfare of laborers. However, in most cases, migrants escape precarious work only to end up in more precarity, such as becoming undocumented and endangering their lives. Because of the killings of migrant OFWs in the 1990s, Migrante International was conceived as an intermediary pushing for migrant rights and welfare, handling thousands of cases of abuse and advocating for socio-economic reforms in the Philippines. As such, Migrante continuously produces political remittances representing migrants’ voices through its statements online, subsequently constructing the migration problem back home. I probe this construction, including the framing of the capability of movement among undocumented migrants through intermediary discourses of Migrante. Specifically, I look at (1) how intermediary discourses conceptualize the migration problem through framing mobility as capability among Filipino migrants and (2) how such discourses serve as political remittances in the process of democratization back home. I argue that the migration problem in the Philippines is characterized by lack of health and social security, insufficient policy aid, migrant rights abuse and anti-immigration movements in host countries. This is further fueled by government neglect towards resolving the root problems of migration, attacks on migrant critics and rights activists and disregard for Filipinos’ fundamental democratic experience. I also claim that Migrante’s discourses serve as political remittances of migrants’ needs and interests, challenging the participatory system of whatever form of democracy present in the country. Its disposition as progressive and humanitarian also establishes its subject positions as a moral actor interested in truth games concerning the migration problem, heavily shaped by government policies and strategies back home.

Keywords: Migrant perspective, Public opinion, Mobility, Capability, Discourses

The Referendum of 23 June 2016, on whether the UK should leave or remain in the EU, and which produced a narrow majority for ‘Brexit’, was a deeply unsettling event for the 3 million EU migrants living in the UK. They were confronted with an ironically analogous decision: should they remain in the UK or should they leave, either to return to their home countries or to move somewhere else? Whilst there is abundant qualitative evidence, based on small-N interview samples, which explores the dilemmas of decision-making and future planning in the light of Brexit, there are few larger-N quantitative surveys. We contribute to rectifying this, through an online survey of 360 Bulgarians in the UK administered in 2019. Our study is also novel because there is little research on Bulgarians, estimated to number about 76,000 at the time of the Referendum and 128,000 four years later.

Basing our conceptual approach on chaos and complexity theory applied to Brexit as a ‘black-swan’ type of unforeseen and turbulent event, the analysis explores the implications of the Referendum outcome for Bulgarian migrants’ decision-making about their future, as well as their current experiences with colleagues, British people, employers and customers where applicable. Is labour-market integration (i.e. skill characteristics) a significant predictor of an individual’s decision to stay or leave? What is the impact of gender and family structures? We implement a multinomial logit model to examine the factors impacting on a migrant’s decision to remain in the UK, return to Bulgaria or move to another country. Relevant factors include age, gender, and length of stay in the UK and labour-market experiences.

Keywords: Migrant perspective, Sending society perspective, Migration decision-making

This article advocates a processual relational approach for studying the European Migrant Crisis. To establish such a research agenda a trans-actional ontology, derived from the work of relational sociologists is connected with the processual relationalist thinking developed in International Relations (IR). When looking at the social world from this viewpoint, it becomes apparent that it is constituted by ‘un-owned’ processes which make our world complex and contingent. Similarly, the concept of ‘wicked problem’ describes a problem that is complex and contingent and in its essence a set of ‘un-owned’ processes. It further dissolves distinctions of local and global and forces to connect micro and macro processes at all times.   Reversely, we point out that wicked problems, such as the European Migrant Crisis, should be studied using a processual relationalist research approach. Processual relationalist research, further, needs to look for constitutive instead of causal explanations, meaning that the entities explained and their relations can be considered separately, but not as being separate.

Keywords: A methodological approach to studying migration processes

Bourdieusian term habitus is a multi-dimensional relational concept, which in this paper will be addressed from the perspective of change. The theoretical and methodological approach will be grounded by the example of Estonia and the possibilities of use in the integration policy. Habitus has for a two-way capacity; it is formulated largely by the family and education system and it manifests itself in the practices. For Bourdieu, changing the habitus is difficult, though possible via scientific reflexivity and artistic creativity, but unfortunately he did not provide any precise methodology for this. The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical and methodological framework to expand the habitus of subject positions, which can be used in formulating integration policies and practices in the formal education field. First, I will examine the concept of habitus and the previous attempts in literature changing it, including Bourdieu’s own idea. I argue that these have been insufficient on a conceptual and methodological level. Second, I will point to the potential value of a synthesis of the ideas of education practices of American pragmatist Dewey and Brazilian philosopher Freire, suggesting that this might allow for a broadening of the idea to expand the concept of habitus. In particular I suggest that this would allow us to re-conceptualize the term “change”. Third, I propose the interactive methodology of Boal which could be utilized in order to achieve this change. Finally, I will wrap up the discussion on the level of the citizenship education and integration policies.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Integration.

This paper scrutinizes the objectives of enhancing integration and social cohesion through immigration rules from a critical perspective of power and conflict theory. It utilizes evidence from the historical doctrine of Law of Nations and historical state practice in the US immigration policy of 18th and 19th century to demonstrate that the regard for perpetuation of the position of power by the ruling was a prominent objective of assuring value, opinion and cultural cohesion among the ruled via state immigration control. Based on this knowledge, the article argues that although to a large extent the interests of the ruling and the ruled in ‘self-preservation of the state’ or ‘social and value cohesion’ intersect, there is an immanent conflict of interests which manifests itself in the way integration measures are conceived within migration law. The article shows that migration rules aimed at enhancing integration are ongoing conceived more broadly than necessary, lack a precise reach and focus on the particular end; and demonstrate an aspect of arbitrariness. This continuously negatively affects the members of the domestic populations and their rights and must be accounted for not as a mistake or a lack of competence on the side of the state, but rather as a conflict of interests.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Migration decision-making, Integration

Relational approach has become popular in many fields of social scientific research, but less so in citizenship studies. This presentation starts from a provocative argument that one of the reasons behind such a fact is that current relational approaches in citizenship studies remains meta-theoretically one-sided. This is based on political bias towards the perspective of the dominated subject positions in various social fields, aiming to empower women, migrants, sexual minorities, cultural minorities etc. (Lister 2007, Yuval-Davies 2006, Turner 2016). While supporting minorities deserves appreciation on a number of grounds, this presentation aims to exemplify how the dialectical relational (DR) approach can be utilized from a broader meta-theoretical perspective, one that is not reduced to the field interest of one particular subject position only. We revisit the ways in which citizenship norms are understood in various citizenship theories, which in turn gives a new perspective on how the politics of belonging and policies of citizen agency (e.g. citizenship policies, integration policies, citizenship education etc.) can be analysed. The innovation of this presentation consists of two interrelated points. First, we argue that the DR provides a broader theoretical perspective on empirical research, insofar as it transcends the one-sidedness of other meta-theories in the field of citizenship studies. One of the key features of such one-sidedness is in interpretation of opponent’s theoretical views as cognitive mistakes. Second, while other metatheories in the field see political nature of social science as a problem, the DR assumes the opposite, by acknowledging that objectification of the political positions of the researcher’s point of view is a prerequisite for reflexive empirical analysis (Bourdieu 1991). In this context, the DR clarifies the types of political positions in the field citizenship studies by linking academic and social fields, based on the principle of homology of fields of Bourdieu, and introducing the opposition between dominant and dominated subject positions, on the one hand, and radical versus moderate subject positions within both, on the other hand. Our case study discusses citizenship policies in Estonia after regaining independence in 1991, but our conclusion targets policy-makers beyond Estonia: in the current context of both right-wing and left-wing political radicalization in the world, supporting the strategy of coalition between moderate subject positions both in social and political fields is relevant more than ever before.

Refugees’ and asylum seekers’ access to health care is an important aspect of their mid- to long-term integration into host countries’ societies – or of political endeavors to keep them at the margins of society, based on different conceptions of these persons either as temporary residents, or as future citizens of the host country. This paper studies recent developments in the political regulation of refugees’ and asylum seekers’ access to health care in Germany and Sweden – two countries which stood out in various ways during the recent so-called ‘migration crisis’. Namely, both countries underwent similar processes of initial demonstrative openness to incoming refugees, presenting themselves as ‘moral superpowers’ (Bradby 2019) in comparison to other European countries, and taking in high numbers of people, but later changing their stance towards refugees and asylum seekers under the impression of growing anxiety vis-à-vis those seeking shelter in Europe. These similar reactions are particularly remarkable considering the fundamental systemic differences between Sweden’s and Germany’s incorporation, welfare and health-care regimes (Sainsbury 2012). Based on a large corpus of legislation and policy documents, this paper demonstrates how and why policy provisions changed over the last five years under the impact of relevant events and developments, such as national elections. In particular, the paper studies the extent to which certain normative understandings of health – e.g. as human right, legal standard, or social benefit – influenced policy provisions for refugees’ and asylum seekers’ health-care access beyond basic checks performed upon arrival in a host country, and emergency care. It also discusses how related policies were shaped by different conceptions of the state’s general role in the provision of health care, and individuals’ claims to and common perceptions of health services e.g. as a benefit which has to be deserved, or as an element of universal protection.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Public opinion, Integration

The research project aims to study whether ethnic diversity and migration have undermined the support for the welfare state and income redistribution in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The ‘ethnic/racial diversity undermines welfare solidarity’ thesis has been previously confirmed for the US (Alesina and Glaeser, 2004). However, the results on Western European countries have remained inconclusive. While looking at CEE, one can find that the ethnic minorities residing in the countries have a diverse background: there are the historical minorities (e.g. the Hungarians in Slovakia), the Soviet time immigrants (e.g. the Russians in Latvia), and now the region may face to a new wave of immigration (the guest workers from the other Eastern European countries). At the same time, those countries have quite underdeveloped welfare state structures. Therefore, CEE could offer a promising and nuanced testing ground for the ‘ethnic diversity undermines welfare solidarity’ thesis. The research project utilizes the data provided by the recent waves of the European Social Survey (2016 and 2018). The quantitative statistical methods, more precisely OLS regression analysis, will be employed for the study. The preliminary results of the analysis demonstrate that ethnic diversity has a weak but statistically significant impact on the attitudes of welfare solidarity. However, the association becomes statistically insignificant if the individual-level variables were included in the models. Consequently, the ‘ethnic diversity undermines welfare solidarity’ thesis found limited support for the post-communist countries. However, it still could be regarded as an important finding, because the majority of the studies on Western Europe have also produced similar inconclusive results. Considering the fact that the current study is the first one, which explores the ‘ethnic diversity undermines welfare solidarity’ thesis in the post-communist settings, it seeks to provide an important contribution to the migration studies.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Public opinion

This paper compares the preparation and immediate response of the governments in Germany and Luxembourg to the massive influx of refugees in 2015. Based on a most similar systems design, document analysis and 20 expert interviews, the paper traces the crisis recognition and preparation in both countries and explains variation. The empirical focus is on the national governments’ role in the fields of registration and housing of asylum seekers. The paper combines theoretical approaches from political science, public administration and comparative sociology.

The paper argues that Luxembourg’s small size facilitated an effective response: First, Luxembourg’s historical experience during wars and previous immigration crises led to the “paradox of vulnerability”, according to which small and vulnerable states are more aware of their own vulnerability to potential risks and crises. In the case of Luxemburg, this raised awareness of a potentially critical increase of the number of asylum seekers even before it happened. Second, simple formal structures and informal personal connections allowed for a quick communication and coordination among Luxemburg’s administrative and political actors. In contrast, Germany’s identity as a large, non-vulnerable country obstructed common awareness for the imminent challenge. The complexity of German government structures led to attention biases and blind spots that impeded communication and adequate preparation.

The talk will further emphasize how differences in past vulnerabilities and present awareness led to a variation not only in the 2015 policy response but also in future public perceptions. Luxembourg’s early awareness and preparation allowed a relatively successful handling of the unusually large influx of refugees, which minimized fears and insecurities among officials and citizens. Until today, there are no xenophobic or right-wing extremist parties in Luxembourg. In Germany, instead, the right-wing AfD party became more successful and migration-related fears have dominated the political debate since 2015.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Public opinion

The relationship between public opinion and immigration policy remains unclear. Despite increasing supranational constraints, government responsiveness is apparent at the national level, though previous research on this subject has often failed to account for seasonality or the ways in which preferences interact with salience.

Keywords: Receiving society perspective, Public policy, Public opinion